This, dear meta-readers, from the Chronical of Higher Education:
This Week's Highlights
Dissecting the Classroom
The classroom: a black box at the core of the traditional college education. Now scholars are investigating just what goes into good teaching.
Highlights from the chronicling of the dissection of the black box core and its feeds. (And locked …

The comforting thing about school is that you won't be left out. Even in dropping out, you have a role to play. That is explicit enough. No, the secretive paranoia in school works the other way, ensuring that nobody leaves the building. If paranoia is always the lonely scene of isolation, we should not be …

Like the Sphinx, my marine Father spoke in riddles. But rather than devouring the individual incapable of answering, he brought about his birth, and deposited him, garbed in the body of a child and full of questions, on the shore where I first recognized myself as human.
—René Daumal, "On the Old Man and the …

We can safely assert, even, that human civilization has added no essential feature to the general idea of play.
—Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1949.
And facing my other most similar faces, those of men, this despair turns in on itself in one last spasm and, with my nails digging into my palm, my fist clenches so as …

On writing effects, desire, and disgust, by William S. Burroughs.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the typewriter scene works nicely in bootleg Russian.
Even as we appear, cinematically, to be moving past its proper time (and its own mode of time, tapping and return), it seems not at all answered—this question of what we are doing when we type.
I …

A little cross posting here. A post on the Aesthetics of Technology blog, Aestech, I sketched up recently has curiously been getting some social media attention. Odd, because I would have imagined it more obscure than most. But somehow what it's probing at seems to resonate. Either that or it's just the fancy blog design, …

Dearest Apparatus,
Just a quick follow up. I know you are busy. I can tell, if you don't mind me teasing you a bit, because you seem to have inadvertently sent out the same letter to me fifteen times. Clearly you are distracted. I recommend breathing exercises. Do you breath? These things can spiral out …

Are we looking at technology? Or are we looking at what technology shows us? Or doubled, even, through another apparatus? Or tripled, presented as an illustrated schematic? Looking at ourselves looking at technology through technology for what it can show us. About ourselves? Welcome to Aestech.

If one were to attempt to locate the fundamental elements of an Aesthetic of Technology, where would one start? What are the marks or gestures that might underpin any effort to render such a thing? What are the basic marks you can make? In geometry, we always forget--since the forms are supposed to be eternal, …

Buckminster Fuller demonstrates a precessional effect. Critical Path, 1981.
Precession, simply put, is a force that is generated as a side effect of another force, orthogonal to it.
A stone dropped in water creates ripples. A tensegrity structure, squashed or pulled, will bow out or squeeze in at the free sides. A spun bike …

THE HAND
I would like to formally propose The Hand as a course that I can teach, and which, more importantly, should be taught. It'll no doubt take many hands pushing leavers and pulling buttons to make it happen. All the more reason.
Hyperallergic has a brief entry on the matter that of course, barely …

Doing a little research for the Aesthetics of Technology course this Fall, I get side-tracked by shoes. Or rather, its hard to find something that shoes aren't at the bottom of. (I'm envisioning a two course "foundations" series now: Interfaces I: Chairs, Interfaces II: Shoes.)
But I digress. Here's the video that side-tracked me: The …

This video is creepy largely because of its own obliviousness to its own creepiness—a disconcerting feedback loop. But isn't it also because we so well know this dream still today? It's not simply the dream of modern technology saving us from the backwardness of school. We should be equally careful not to wax nostalgic …

Dear Apparatus,
Thank you, I received your email, "Data Verification for Alumni." So good to hear from you. I have missed hearing about you as well. Oh, sorry, this is 73454-M903. I understand that my Important Alumni Verification is now due...sorry, what's that you say?...oh, the Deadline is Approaching. I hope this letter reaches you …

The lads is attending school nessans regular, sir, spelling beesknees with hathatansy and turning out tables by mudapplication. Allfor the books and never pegging smashers after Tom Bowe Glassarse or Timmy the Tosser. 'Tisraely the truth!
—Joyce, Finnegan's Wake
Tisreally the truth
Tisrarely the truth...
Turning out tables...

Saw this in the subway today, and was shocked. First at the banality of it, the stupidest of reasons, but then at the brazen honesty. It always amazes me when the starkest of truths not only leak out but are proudly displayed.
The glare in the car was atrocious so let me just run through …